COVER UP: Media Devoted Just 51 Seconds To Cuomo Nursing Home Scandal In 2020.
Mainstream media outlets dedicated a mere 51 seconds to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home scandal throughout 2020.
“A Nexis search found ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News discussed Cuomo in at least 401 evening news stories between March 1 and December 31, 2020, including weekends. Yet only two of those stories, both on Nightly News, made any reference to Cuomo’s nursing home order. Total airtime: a mere 51 seconds,” Newsbusters summarizes.
ABC’s World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News failed entirely to touch the scandal, which saw nursing homes admit COVID-19-infected patients,
“The first actual reference on an evening newscast came on the May 11 Nightly News, when correspondent Cynthia McFadden spent 13 seconds assuring viewers that “over the weekend, New York’s Governor Cuomo reversed his controversial policy forcing nursing homes to take back COVID patients,” Newsbusters adds.
The other 38 seconds of coverage came from NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez, who, while accompanying Cuomo on a trip to Georgia, asked: “If you had to do it over again, would you have issued that same directive or was it a mistake?”
Cuomo responded: “We looked at this factually. If you look at when the nursing home deaths happened, it has no correlation to that order.”
And a similar pattern persists in 2021.
From January 28th to February 25th, the same mainstream media outlets have devoted 10 minutes and 56 seconds to the scandal – nearly as much as the eight minutes and 51 seconds of airtime as they devoted in just four days to Senator Ted Cruz’s Cancun Trip.
